We can see only three lines of action. There ought to be the strongest possible appeal, to rich and poor alike, to economize in expenditure, especially in meat and alcohol, in motor-cars and petrol, in tobacco and tea, in servants and great houses, in travelling and amusements, and in anything that comes from abroad. Why should not Mr. Asquith, as Prime Minister, make this appeal, going into some detail as to the desirable economies for the several grades of income, and arranging systematically for its enforcement by every newspaper, from every pulpit, in every school and college, and by every legislator in his own constituency? Example, be it not forgotten, will be even more potent than precept. In the second place, we want a great deal more advertisement and development of the facilities for saving. Why does not the Post Office, which is, after all, the State Department for saving, come forward with all sorts of new expedients, shedding its silly restrictions, boldly advertising its opportunities, making all its quarter of a million employees into soliciting agents, continuously selling not only life assurance and annuities, but also Consols and War Loan scrip in one pound units over the counter of every post office, opening a receiving office next to every wage-paying wicket, stimulating every school savings bank-there are still actually schools not yet equipped with them and putting as much energy and resourcefulness into the business of tapping the savings of each class, from the lowest to the highest, as the industrial and other The New Statesman

life insurance offices do? What a mistake Mr. McKenna will make if he issues the next War Loan only to the wealthy, instead of ignoring the bankers' prejudices and appealing to all the ten million households of the United Kingdom each to take up its bit, however small, even down to a single pound. The third course, and it is this, after all, on which we shall have to place our main reliance, is taxation. We ought to look forward in the Budget that must be forthcoming in the autumn to the levying of at least three hundred millions in additional taxation, including (a) a surtax of 50 per cent on the amount by which any business income for 1914-15 exceeded the average of the three preceding years; (b) whatever addition to the duties on alcoholic drinks, tobacco, and tea is possible consistently with maintaining the revenue; (c) such an addition to the duties on motor-cars used by private persons, men servants, race-horses, and dogs, and such new duties on private yachts, shootings and fishings let for rent, and any third house in anybody's occupation, as would put a stigma on such personal expenditure at the present time; (d) a further doubling of the income tax and super-tax; and (e) a trebling of all the death duties, possibly with a further abatement on small estates, and suitable concessions where the death has occurred on active service. If Mr. McKenna wishes, as we have no doubt he does, to stimulate personal economy, let him in the matter of taxation take his courage in both hands.

Miss Daisy Rhodes Campbell deserves thanks for the title of her "The Proving of Virginia" for it re

minds the most careless reader that "prove," as a law term is really derived from the Scriptural "prove," "to

The

test," and also exposes the fallacy in the ordinary interpretation of the undeniable commonplace "The exception proves the rule." Virginia is proved by good fortune and bad, by success and by apparent failure, and is always shown to be pure gold. story abounds with innocent fun dashed with sufficient seriousness for the edification of the young reader and the satisfaction of the censorious who are not "quite sure that reading stories is good for Mary Jane." Students aweary of setting "Busy" upon their doors may find relief in inscribing, in verse form, "Please don't rap, Or else I'll scrap. Keep out of here, Or I'll break a cheer, Over your head!" Virginia smiles on jacket and cover with a red rose in her hair wooing the readers of "The Fiddling Girl" to learn more about her. The Page Company.

Small, Maynard & Co. publish in the "Welfare Series" a volume entitled "The Field of Social Service" edited by Philip Davis, in collaboration with Maida Herman, in which are grouped no less than twenty practical papers by recognized authorities and experts in various departments of social activity. Robert A. Woods, of the South End House, Boston, opens with a paper on "The Great Watchwords of Social Work"; Jeffrey R. Brackett, of the Boston School for Social Workers, writes of "The Community and the Citizen"; and these papers on the general aspects of the subject are followed by discussions of The Housing Problem, Fire Prevention, Health and Medical Social Service, Playgrounds, Recreation, The New Immigration, Industrial Problems, Child Labor Reform, The School and the Community, the Vocational Movement in Education, Juvenile Delinquency, Public and Private Relief, Social Settlement Work, Child Caring, Organization of

Charity, the Church and Social Service, Religion and Social Service, and these by supplementary chapters on salaried positions and opportunities for training. This enumeration of subjects serves to show the scope of the volume, and the editors, as has been intimated, have been fortunate in securing a person of large practical experience to treat each department. The result is a handbook at once up-to-date and of permanent value. There are a dozen illustrations from photographs.

Kestner of the Secret Service, whose office is under his hat and whose home is all Europe, is the hero of Mr. Arthur Stringer's "The Hand of Peril," and a very agreeable person he is for an ally. For his enemies, Italian, German or French, he is a person very heartily to be hated, and the story of his relations with them and of their very remarkable ending is as absorbing as if the most audacious of Frenchmen had written it. Its style is good, too; far better than it would have been a few years ago, when Mr. Stringer had not quite decided what species of novel best suited his abilities. The heroine is a beautiful thief and forger, and the daughter of a black-mailer, and under her guidance the reader sees things generally hidden from the visitor to Palermo and Paris, and learns how wicked a metropolis may be, even in virtuous America. The comic thief with a vocabulary of sorts, is also offered for his consideration, and he must be hard to please, if he be not delighted with the good and bad company presented to him. The manner in which Mr. Stringer brings about the heroine's complete reformation is as summary as it is effectual. "The Hand of Peril" would give a metropolitan flavor to the Adirondacks and console a passenger enduring the roughest of Atlantic voyages. The Macmillan Company.

SUNG ON A BY-WAY.

What of all the will to do?

It has vanished long ago, For a dream-shaft pierced it through From the Unknown Archer's bow.

What of all the soul to think? Some one offered it a cup Filled with a diviner drink,

And the flame has burned it up.

What of all the hope to climb?
Only in the self we grope
To the misty end of time:
Truth has put an end to hope.

What of all the heart to love?

Sadder than for will or soul,

No light lured it on above;

Love has found itself the whole.

A. E.

THE "ORION'S" FIGUREHEAD AT

WHITEHALL.

All wind and rain, the clouds fled fast across the evening skyWhitehall aglimmer like a beach the

tide has scarce left dry;

And there I saw the figurehead which once did grace the bow

Of the old bold Orion,
The fighting old Orion,

In the days that are not now.

And I wondered did he dream at all of those great fights of old,

And ships from out whose oaken sides
Trafalgar's thunder rolled;
There was Ajax, Neptune, Temeraire,
Revenge, Leviathan,

With the old bold Orion,
The fighting old Orion,

When Victory led the van.

Old ships, their ribs are ashes now; but still the names they bore And still the hearts that manned them

live to sail the seas once more, To sail and fight, and watch and ward, and strike as stout a blow As the old bold Orion, The fighting old Orion, In the wars of long ago.

They watch, the gaunt gray fighting ships, in silence bleak and stern;

The

youngest navy in Europe, whose supreme officer until recently was an honorary Admiral of the Fleet in the British service, and professed his respect for British naval traditions, has reverted to the most ancient, repellent, and irreparable crimes of war, for life can never be given back. We are confronted with an atavistic throwback to the methods of barbarism of the fifteenth century, practised with the most complicated and delicate instruments of war of the twentieth century. The new type of warfare is pursued by a Power which boasts of its "Kultur," has brought to its assistance every refinement of mechanics and chemistry, and-crowning evidence of moral degradation-claims in the eyes of the world that its very acts of "frightfulness" are fruits of virtue signs of courage, virility, and fitness to win, and proof, above all, of its right to rule the rest of the world. "We are," it is, in effect, declared, "the only nation with the stomach to commit such acts, and, therefore, we are superior to other nations and entitled to govern them."

The contagion of crime is like that of a plague; a crime applauded by a whole nation, as the acts of the German Navy have been applauded, is peculiarly dangerous to virtue. Burke once remarked that "war suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated." Hitherto, even in war time, belligerent nations have preserved certain decencies. The Japanese were so determined to observe the conventions that an international lawyer accompanied the main fleet at sea; the Navy of Germany, the parvenu among European nations, has ignored international law and abandoned

all restraints on its conduct at sea. As a New York newspaper recently remarked, the fingers of many of its officers and men are dripping with the blood of the innocent. If its policy of brigandage and murder should succeed, even in a minor degree, what then? The peril to the souls of the nations of the world must increase in exact proportion as the Germans by their wrongful acts at sea attain their ends-psychological, economic, or military.

The moral sense of the world shows a distinct tendency to become benumbed and dull owing to the repeated shocks, on a continually rising scale, received since Germany inaugurated her reign of terror at sea by laying mines in the pathway of peaceful commerce, contrary to her pledged word. Excess has encouraged excess, and one by one all the generally accepted customs of warfare between civilized nations have been dethroned, and Germany has claimed the right to ignore not merely the conventions of the Hague, which attempted to codify the rules and regulations which were regarded as axioms less than a year ago, but the ordinary sentiments of our common humanity. The present purpose is to deal with acts contrary to international law and the dictates of our common decency which have been committed by the enemy at sea. The record of the German Army is familiar, but less attention has been given to the series of outrages committed by the Germans at sea.

Napoleon once declared that war is "the trade of barbarians"; but sailors, even more than soldiers perhaps, have always admitted that there are certain acts which are inexcusable, even in the height of war, when the passions of